Jonathan Larson’s hit musical was one of the theatrical events of the 1990s, but somehow I never managed to see it.

Now, though, I know that if he hadn’t died from an aortic aneurysm the night before his show opened off Broadway in 1996, Larson would have become the foremost musical composer of his generation.

This is the work of a young man and some of the Billy Joel-ish rock music running through it is a little outre. Parts of the plot, inspired by Puccini’s La Boheme, about pan-sexual, Aids-stricken artists slumming it in NYC, are pure nachos.

Yet there is a drive, energy and variety to this sung-through, two-hour 40-minute show which is enough to stun you.

Larson’s score drops in and out of musical registers from rock to blues, with funk, soul and spells of ecstatic gospel thrown in.

Following his hero, Stephen Sondheim, his lyrics are stitched together from street vernacular, and the lives of his characters flow through each other in a river of sound.

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Although hailed as a groundbreaking musical of gay and lesbian liberation, its message of love and mutual dependence is for everyone. What it needs is a director who can ride its competing forces and, in Bruce Guthrie’s touring production, that’s exactly what they’ve got.

Like the score, Guthrie’s show is frenetic and euphoric, shimmying up and down the scaffolding of Anna Fleischle’s industrial design and declaiming from its platforms.

Layton Williams as Angel in Rent, Jonathan Larson’s hit musical was one of the theatrical events of the 1990s

Some of the sexual posturing is jejune, but you’ve got to be young, or at least young at heart, to really enjoy it anyway.

Layton Williams is astonishing as the show’s tragic drag-queen. Cartwheeling, spinning and leaping into the splits — in 9in platform boots — is remarkable enough, but he does it all while singing his heart out.

Shanay Holmes and Lucie Jones war like a lesbian coupling of Whitney Houston and Cher, but there are sweetly soulful moments, too, sung by Ryan O’Gorman as a bereaved lover.

Rent abounds with the sadness and joy of Larson’s curtailed talent and remains a rowdy tribute to a lost time and place.